The God of My Salvation

I awoke rattled to my bones. Adrift. Spiritually rudderless. Lost in an abyss of darkness.

Ancient familial and unknown spirits seemed to claw at my soul, or whatever it was they hungered for. A bleak and desolate place. All knowing left me. As if I had been stripped of all spiritual armour.

I said the Lord's Prayer. I said the Jesus Prayer. Still, I felt I needed more. A prayer to Archangel Michael, perhaps, if only I knew it.

I hadn't read my Bible in months.

There was a time when I would sit with it each morning, holding it for a moment before opening it. Feeling into it. Allowing it to offer whatever passage it would.

Last Saturday I pulled it from the shelf. Tried to engage with it. Nothing. I couldn't feel it at all.

I was bereft.

This morning, having woken in that state, I approached it again. Without ceremony. Took it in my hands, barely offering it a moment to read me.

And in that absolute unknowing, in what felt like an entirely unwilled movement, my fingers and eyes arrived at Psalm 88.

I don't know if you're familiar with it.

It is one of the bleakest passages in the Bible.

Unlike most psalms of lament, it offers no resolution. No reassurance. No triumphant return to hope.

It ends in darkness.

The psalmist cries out to God from the depths of his suffering. He is abandoned by friends and loved ones. His soul is full of troubles. He feels himself already among the dead.

And God is nowhere to be found.

In Christian contemplative theology, Psalm 88 has a particular resonance with St John of the Cross and his account of divine absence, the dark night of the soul.

But there is something even more disturbing about this psalm.

There is no promise that the darkness will lift.

No assurance that the suffering is meaningful. No suggestion that the man will emerge purified, enlightened, or spiritually improved.

Nothing.

And yet, from within that darkness, he addresses God.

O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee.

Those are the opening words.

Not the God of my suffering. Not the God who has abandoned me.

The God of my salvation.

Before a single word of anguish, before the accusations, before the terrible inventory of his suffering, the relationship is already there.

And it remains there, even as everything else disappears.

I had opened my Bible looking for something. Protection, perhaps. Reassurance. Some small indication that I was not entirely lost.

Instead, I found a man who had been there before me.

And he had nothing reassuring to say.